Perturbing
nearly a month after the tsunami hit India's eastern coast, some districts of Andhra Pradesh are reporting incidents of water appearing in wells that had dried up long ago. The first such occurrence was sighted recently in Mukundapur village of Ranga Reddy district, where about 30 centimetre deep water seeped into a farm plot. Similar reports came in from Medak, Adilabad, and Mahboobnagar districts. Scientists believe the water is appearing due to new fissures in the tectonic zone caused by the tsunami earthquake.
The affected farm in Mukundapur has acquired sacredness overnight. Its owner has barricaded the "divine water' that is drawing people from neighbouring villages in large numbers. Strangely, the water level in nearby borewells has not increased. Just six months ago, a borewell sunk about 15 metres (m) from the farm had yielded no water. Nearly five kilometres (km) away, in Tandur, nine metre deep water has appeared in a 10 m dry well that was used for dumping garbage for more than a decade. A seismic station has been set up at Chincholi, about 50 km from Tandur, to study seismic activities in the area.
Scientists at the National Geophysical Research Institute (ngri), Hyderabad, believe that the sub-sea earthquake near Sumatra that led to the tsunami disaster has caused underground fissures in these areas. "The groundwater seepage is just an indication of tectonic activity and this does not result in any major disaster,' says R K Chadha, an ngri scientist. "The country's weaker belts in the Godavari region and Gujarat have been disturbed due to the Sumatra quake. Water seepage in several parts of Andhra Pradesh may or may not lead to an earthquake, but it is always better to be alert,' he cautions. Quoting a similar instance, he says after the November 2003 Alaska earthquake, there was a rise in the level of groundwater in Utah in the us , 2,000 km away from the quake's epicentre. "Utah experienced quakes of magnitude four on the Richter scale. The Godavari area and Ongole region experience regular seismic shocks of such magnitude and, therefore, there is nothing to fear or panic about,' he adds. J V M Naidu, chairperson of Indian Meteorological Society, Visakhapatnam chapter, also says new fissures have developed in tectonic zones around Vizianagaram, Srikakulam, Prakasam, Chittoor, Hyderabad and Bhadrachalam. Another ngri official says the occurrence of water maybe due to a natural hydraulic flow from the Bhima basin.
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